Scott was a pro at picking the best local food throughout our honeymoon. I picked whatever my carb-loving heart desired, but he consistently ordered the local specialty everywhere we went. Good job, husband!

Well, we decided to recreate one of those awesome local specialties–the Bologna pumpkin ravioli, to be exact. And I believe our collective thought process went like this: “It’s pasta. Fancy, pasta, but still. How hard can it be to make it from scratch?”

So the goal was pumpkin ravioli with pancetta mixed into the innards and a balsamic reduction on top. We started off without any real problems. Scott made the ravioli guts with just a little moment of kerfuffle that involved cooking while on the phone with a friend and realizing that two ingredients hadn’t been grated/chopped/added yet. No big deal.

I made the pasta dough with relative ease, then our friends/neighbors/cooking buddies arrived with cauliflower soup to eat with us. Nothing was assembled yet, so Theresa helped get the dough in the fridge for a half hour of resting, and we enjoyed soup. It was delicious, and the night was still bright and shiny.

Then things got interesting. All of a sudden, Theresa was rolling out dough like her life depended on it. (We don’t have a pasta maker, which would press the dough into sheets you can see through, but Theresa totally fixed that problem.)

I was giving the cut up pieces of dough an egg wash so they would stick together later, trying not to get them stuck together too early in the game. Scott stuffed ravioli guts like a boss, and Weber made sure the ravioli was closed securely enough to make it through some boiling action.

I know it sounds like we had a system, and we did. It felt a lot more chaotic in real life than it sounds in blog entry, however.

Oh, and there was balsamic vinegar with a bay leaf and some fresh rosemary reducing on the stove top. It smelled so so good (until it didn’t smell good at all). There was a moment in which the reduction turned from gooey goodness to charred sugary mess. Oops. We ended up remaking the mixture and using it in heated, not reduced form. It worked anyway.

Whoo. All of that to say that we made a delicious dinner on Monday. And on this non-Thanksgiving day, I’m grateful for a husband who likes to cook adventurous things and for friends who help us avoid insanity while cooking.

In case you want to try the complicated dish that is homemade pumpkin ravioli, here are the recipes we used:

1. Emeril’s Pumpkin Ravioli Hats (we did make some changes on this one)
2. Tyler Florence’s Pasta Dough for Ravioli
3. Lidia’s Reduced Balsamic Vinegar